The FM Library

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Creator name & what made you choose it?

I’ve had a few different names in my content life, first I was BadjokesFM as I thought that stood out & as my wife will tell you I’m a nonstop badjokes machine. After that I was TaylorMadeGaming for a while.

Now I’m StaylorComms as for the last year and a half I’ve been doing football commentaries online and loving it so I’d like to try and move into that kind of work.

Real name?

Spencer Taylor

Favourite football team?

West Ham United

Talk me through your FM journey – where does it start?

Ok, it goes all the way back to the late 90’s & my primary school days. I was around one of my mates and he happened to have premier manager 97. I think it was for the PS1, Once we had loaded it up and played I was hooked for life.

In fact one of my favourite players of all time comes from the Premier Manager series on the 99 edition. A guy called Sean Devine who played for Barnet in Division 2 but you could sell him for £10 million at the start of the game and then spend all that on current Prem’ players to storm all the way up to the Premier League

Ok, you’ve been playing the game, what made you jump from “player” to “creator” and how have you found the journey?

Well ok, I started creating content back in 2017, I did youtube videos to begin with for about 4 years on and off before finally moving over to the blogs im doing now.

The journey has been an interesting one. I’ve learnt so many skills that I wish I’d had earlier in life I.E Editing and speaking on camera so it’s been mostly positive but there have also been times when it can be a grind and a challenge but all the confidence I’ve gained since starting certainly outweighs the bad stuff.

I’ve had some great experiences as well since starting content creation, number 1 of which is the FM meetup a few of us creators did in Nottingham a few years back now with Loki and Lollujo. I met some awesome guys that day and had so much fun which made the 8 hour coach ride there and back so worthwhile.

What’s your style of play? Within the library we have a couple of guys who plough through seasons letting the Assistant Manager’s do the vast majority of stuff, mainly getting into the late 2060’s trying to complete bizarre and random challenges, but we also have guys who are very much into the finite detail and will manage every aspect and would consider a save done after 5 or 6 seasons. Where do you fit within the scale? There is of course, no incorrect answer.

I’ve gotta say I’m in the middle and I don’t know if I can explain why but over last couple of versions I’ve started taking more control of stuff like I always try to do my own training now whereas before I’d leave to my assistant and never touch it but now after seeing a few guides I feel like it’s unrealistic to leave it to my staff.

I do a lot before the season starts, but once we’re into competitive games I get through the week between games quite quickly. I prefer squad building and transfers over tactics, the game is becoming too complicated with tactics which is understandable with how real life football is going This old man gets confused with it so i prefer to try and buy the best players I can then just hope their quality negates my tactical stupidity 

Favourite version/save? Any particular bittersweet/comic/downright depressing memories?

My Favourite version was FM2008. I was in college at the time and my addiction to FM really took hold here. I would spend all night from getting home to like 4 or 5 am getting through seasons quickly as I attempted to make West Ham the best team in the world.

However my favourite save was on FM20, my Walks to Prem’ save with King’s Lynn, it had everything, my hometown club at their highest point ever at the start of the save with a cult hero goal scorer and the potential to have a good run at getting into the football league. That’s exactly what we did after taking 5 seasons to get out of the Vanarama north. We then got two promotions in row to get all the way up to league one before my laptop died and I lost the save.

I found my favourite ever FM non league gem in this save as well David Mbala from Congleton we signed him on a free and he had a massive role in us getting into the football league for the first ever time.

It was also my favourite as it was the best content I’ve ever created either on YouTube or on Blogs the editing was really good and I had so many graphics in my videos that  created for every video so I was proud of the work that went into the videos as well as the success we had in the save.

Which bloggers do you always make sure that you read?

I really enjoy Coxie’s content. I like that they are normally short, sweet and succinct. They still do a great job at getting you invested in the save whilst not taking up all day to read them.

I know he’s writing his updates on the SortItOutSI now but LutterworthFox’s blogs so I’m excited to see how his Queens Park save goes this year. There’s also Maddfm but more about him in the next question. 

Who within the community, seriously impresses you – produces the type of content that you just think “Wow, I couldn’t even contemplate producing stuff to that level?
Well we’re talking blogs here and there’s only one name to mention here, the man the myth, the legend MaddFM. I love his content and his style, how he grabs you and pulls you into his save in a way nobody else can in my opinion. You can just tell how much research and work he puts into his content every single time so for me he stands above everyone and I’d love to be 10% as good as him at writing. 

What puts you off reading other creators blogs – what makes you click that “X” button in the top right of the page? For me it’s when you can tell that people haven’t spell checked or proofread  their blogs before pressing publish.

If you can’t be bothered to check your writing before sending it out to the world then I wont read it. Another annoyance I have is because I read on my phone. I don’t like when bloggers forget to make their images expandable so that’s another thing that will make me click off a post.

Ok, final question.. I have 5 minutes and I have a list of blogs in front of me – In 100 words, why should I click on your blog…

Ok I may not go into as much detail as some other people however you will have a good time either from the jokes I make in my posts because my old name was BadJokesFM so I still need to keep that going. Another reason is you’ll feel better about your own save when you realise there’s always someone worse at the game than you. That person is nearly always me so you can see what not to do in your save.

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I’d like to thank Spencer for taking the time out his schedule to do this for us. Please give him a follow on Twitter and subscribe to his blog to make sure you don’t miss out on any future updates from him.

As always, if this is something you would like to take part in then either drop a comment underneath the post, DM either ourselves @TheFMLibrary, @FM_Burt or message us on our discord server, here.